Too much news

I've done a fair amount of driving today: all the way down to Bexleyheath and back to Highgate. As a result, I've listened to a lot of Radio 4, and can only conclude that too much news gets broadcast these days. Regular readers of this blog will know that I'm trying to avoid news at the moment. It seems pointless. Unnecessarily bleak. Divisive. And yet, for my entire hour's journey there and back I heard nothing but news. In fact, I heard the same reports over and over again, to the extent that I was hearing the exact same words coming over the airways at the exact same point on both journeys. It was excessively dull, particularly as most of the airtime was dedicated to Northern Irish people going on about the death of Martin McGuinness. Whenever I hear that accent, I tend to hear the squelch of homophobia.

Yeah. I get it: we can't take laptops on planes from Turkey any more, Colin Dexter has died (he started writing crime novels on a wet holiday in Wales, woopie doo) and Nicola Sturgeon hates Theresa May. Radio 4 have told me these facts repeatedly. I would rather have heard Poetry Please, or, let's face it, the Shipping Forecast.

I was in the curious concrete jungle known as Bexleyheath for a meeting with Hannah, where we essentially unstitched the whole of the first act of Em. It was a hugely productive evening. I got to hang out with Hannah's delightful son and we had a lovely meal. We worked hard and I left feeling pretty exhausted!

This morning I had a meeting at Central with a chap called Chris who's MD-ing Em. We worked our way through the show's music, bar by bar and I think he's feeling fairly enthused about the show as a result. Just like policemen, MDs are getting younger by the minute! I don't yet think I've worked with one in musical theatre over the age of 25!